Mass screening could 'wipe Aids out in 40 years'

Mass screening of everyone at risk of Aids could wipe out the disease within 40 years, a leading researcher has claimed.

Under the radical plan, billlions of people would be offered HIV tests once a year - and then treated with anti viral drugs if they tested positive.

The move could stop the transmission of the virus within five years - and end the global Aids epidemic by the middle of the century.

The AIDS virus has infected an estimated 33 million people and killed 25 million.

Sex workers in India attend an HIV/AIDS awareness campaign

The new plan is the brainchild proposed by Dr Brian Williams of the South African Centre for Epidemiological Modelling and Analysis who is part of a growing number of scientists who believe anti-HIV drugs - rather than new vaccines - are the best way of preventing and eliminating the spread of AIDS.

A clinical trial of the plan will be tested later this year in South Africa - the country with the highest incidence of HIV and Aids in the world. It will be followed by trials in areas of American and Canadian cities where the disease is rampant.

The plan is adopted, screening would be offered in Britain to anyone at high risk of Aids.

'Our immediate best hope is to use anti retroviral drugs only to save lives but also to reduce transmission of HIV," Dr Williams told the American Association for the Advancement of Science meeting in San Diego.

'I believe if we used antiretroviral drugs we could effectively stop transmission of HIV within five years.'

Once the current generation of people living with HIV die out in a few decades, the disease would die with them.

The drugs lower the concentration of HIV - the virus that causes AIDS - in the blood, making the people carrying the virus less infectious.

'The problem is that we are using the drugs to save lives, but we are not using them to stop transmission,' Dr Williams said.

The price would be enormous - costing £2 billion in South African alone. Dr Williams said the cost would be offset by savings in healthcare and lives.

The world spends more than £19 billion a year on Aids research, treatment and management, a figure which may have to double in the next 10 years, he said.

Attempts to develop an effective HIV vaccine had failed so far, as had efforts to promote behavioural changes such as safe sex.

Getting people to agree to be tested would not be a significant obstacle, he believed. Studies indicated that communities in Africa, which had the worst rates of infection, would be happy to co-operate.

Persuading people in developed countries to take the test might be more difficult, but not impossible, said Dr Williams. In the trials, people will be offered HIV tests once a year when they visit their GP.

'The epidemic of HIV is really one of the worst plagues of human history,' Dr Williams said.

'I hope we can get to the starting line in one to two years and get complete coverage of patients in five years. Maybe that's being optimistic, but we're facing Armageddon.'